In a context in which France is closing its borders to job-seeking immigrants and adopting a dissuasive asylum policy, asylum-seekers are viewed with increasing suspicion by the institutions in charge of delivering refugee status. Refugee status has become a rare commodity, and asylum seekers must intensify their efforts to convince institutions of the truth of their allegations. In this context, knowledge (or "know-how") of psychoclinicians is mobilized by the refugees and their lawyers during the legal process. This paper seeks to understand, on the one hand, the reason why and the ways psychoclinicians are more and more implicated in this legal space and, on the other hand, the political, professional and ethical issues debated within medical NGOs in France concerning this new role and the different ways in which these professionals attempt to resolve them. This paper is based on an ethnographic field study of several months inside several French medical NGOs that offers psychological services to asylum seekers. © 2006 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.

Expertise Mobilization Ethic Asylum right trauma

human medical ethics politics refugee ethnology medical practice medical profession Article France medical service immigration legal aspect